Rajan, who is serving as the head of the Reserve Bank of India, also was feted with a symposium - Banking, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy - that centered on his work after the Center for Financial Studies (CFS) award was presented.

“Research is a very lonely pastime. There are many times where you spend weeks in the office wondering if anyone in the world cares what you’re doing and what you’re thinking about, and that’s why it’s very important to have partners in research who can share the joys of discovery and who are as enthusiastic about those arcane details as you are,” he said during his acceptance speech. “And it’s been my fortune to be blessed with great colleagues and mentors.”

“It’s a great pleasure to talk about the research of my good friend Raghu Rajan, who is the winner of this year’s Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, and who not only is one of the profession’s best economists in all fields, but who has exactly the right values when he chooses problems to work on, how to approach them and how to take them to execution and reality,” Diamond said.

Rajan also thanked many of the colleagues and mentors who have worked with him through the years, including Booth colleagues Eugene Fama, Diamond, Luigi Zingales, Randall Kroszner and Anil Kashyap.

“I am honored that a jury of such respected academic colleagues has awarded me with this prize. I also thank my colleagues, both from academia and from the central banking community, for participating in the seminar organized by the Center for Financial Studies,” Rajan said in a CFS release. “This is a time of great uncertainty in global financial markets, and it was good to discuss academic theory and policy practice in such times.”

Rajan is the second Booth professor to receive the Deutsche Bank award. Eugene Fama, Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, won the inaugural prize in 2005. Other winners include Michael Woodford, a professor of political economy at Columbia University, in 2007; Robert J. Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and professor of finance at Yale School of Management, in 2009; and Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics and of Public Policy at Harvard University in Cambridge, in 2011.

Rajan started teaching at Booth in 1991. He served as economic counselor and director of research at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006, was chairman of the High Level Committee on Financial Sector Reforms in India in 2007 and 2008, and was an honorary economic adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh between 2008 and 2012. In 2011, Rajan was the president of the American Finance Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, in 2003, Rajan won the inaugural Fischer Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association to the best financial economist younger than 40.